Temptation in the Village

I admit I cringe at hearing a work is (yet another) retelling of a beloved or important classic in Twine or Inform. There've been a few adaptations of poems into hypertextual form, and some work quite well, my favorite being one written in Squiffy that the author had taken down. They do feel workmanlike or more like "hey, I like this too." Which is hardly a crime, but, well, I found myself saying, what about an author's other works that might fit the medium better? Here I like that the author has taken a Kafka story other than the Metamorphosis and made it fit well.

Text adventures aren't the only medium where this can be done--on Twitter (I'll always call it that) there's an account called SportsButMakeItArt, which features art we may not know and compares it to a screenshot from a sporting event. It's wonderful and cool and I learn a lot from it. They avoid popular works. It teaches us without any "OK, time to learn, kids." It's one of the few reasons I go back to Twitter. (Another big one is Rep. Jack Kimble. IYKYK.) So I like that TitV shows us something new beyond just a new form of presentation.

And Kafka seems like a good author to write a text adventure about, or at least a simple one, and the story is chosen well. The main characters wind up feeling like that had no agency in the end. They're pushed along by people smarter or at least more cunning than them. And they're rejected without satisfactory explanation. There seems to be so much possibility in the parser, but often there isn't really.

This is the case here, too, and I missed the foreshadowing in "just get things done" mode. TiTV is a relatively sparse twelve rooms with the promise of more, but you're rejected from certain passages. That's too private right now, etc. At the start, you are walking east, to a town, but you're a bit tired and there's that village to the north you've never seen before. You stay for the night. It's free, a village resident says. You return a dog to a woman, feeling as though it's your fault it got lost, or at the very least that you made so much noise returning it. In the process you find a guest room you weren't offered. You wonder why, and the man you met explains: the innkeeper must trust you to give you that room. You want that room. You just need to do a few simple chores. People seemed friendly. It reminded me of a picture at the end of Amerika, where Karl Rossman meets up with the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, all smiling line-drawn people that would be out of place in pretty much any other Kafka story. I was optimistic!

The first chore is straightforward, but the second is a bit odd. This is where we get into spoiler territory: you have a realization. The realization reminded me of times people had left me fit in if I did something for them. I'd fit in just fine, sure. But maybe I never got a call back. Or maybe they had private conversations among themselves where I wasn't allowed. We all have had those episodes. But this is something more: something with a little arm-twist, where if you don't know how to push back and call things out for what they are, you'll get stuck. Throughout the game there's a sense you feel you're imposing. The innkeepers say you talk too much. The kids you sleep with in the attic are upset you woke them. And so on. You get things for free, well, monetarily.

And yet, it's nice how one task helps you with another, right? There's also a suspicion that the foreman made it so you had to do the tasks in an awkward order, and this wasn't adventure game logic. Then the reveal at the end. I felt it was unfair at first, well, to the reader. But I had another look. The next time, things clicked more, that it was fair, and it reminded me of stupid hazing rituals or people who just want to keep you busy on something other than your own thoughts. I was reminded of the Saved by the Bell episode where Zack was still in junior high, and he went through an initiation, only to find the real initiation was getting kids to pretend to an eighth-grader that he'd be accepted. This isn't quite so personal, and it has no crowd going "aww" in the background. But it reminded me of people who acted like they had more authority than they did, and how I believed them, because surely someone else wold've set them straight? (In some cases, these people were new and I was not.)

On replaying, I wrote down memories of some people who felt that way, who made me jump through hoops. Not any farmwork or anything. But I remember people telling me a lie and saying I had to believe it, and I felt uneasy, and maybe sometimes I saw most of the proof they were lying but I couldn't go along with it. And I went along with it here, a few times, but with a different purpose each time, feeling wiser each time through.

The ending is less fatalistic than The Metamorphosis or The Trial, so there's that. I found it easy enough to work through. I do remember people in high school saying The Metamorphosis was some fearsome thing (they were in Advanced Placement English, I was not,) then being shocked at how short it was, on reading it in an introductory college writing course. I remember hearing people use and over-use "Kafkaesque." And the huge section of literary criticism of Kafka in the library. Kafka was a Big Name. Then I buckled down and read him and felt I still missed the point. Perhaps I still do, and this is a minor work of his for a very good reason. But it made me feel like I could pull my bootstraps up, and I'll remember it, after playing Let Me Play! earlier today. It was a different look at free will and what the player could do. The characters sort of float about as you try to find your way. I guess I fell prey to the blind obedience the main character had, just wanting to get through things and not paying attention. Sometimes we have to be that way. And it's better to be caught like this in a text adventure than real life.